Book Review: River Clyde, Chastity Riley Book 5, Simone Bucholz, translated by Rachel Ward
Fiction: River Clyde, Chastity Riley Book 5, Simone Bucholz, translated by Rachel Ward
Blog Tour March 18, 2022
I don’t know how to characterize this book. I am not even sure it’s fair to try. River Clyde follows police officers, some of them on a case, but it is not a police procedural. The case is almost irrelevant to the arc of the book and the characters.
Chastity Riley, prosecutor in Hamburg, is trying to recover from a terrible incident. That incident killed an officer and another officer lost an arm. She has also ended a relationship. When a letter comes telling her she has inherited a house in Scotland, she decides to go to Glasgow for an extended time to check things out.
Only two of the regular officers she works with are back on the job. The others are still trying to get their lives back together after the incident that so shook up Riley. Some of them are working on their issues together, while others are keeping their distance while struggling to put things into context.
The book shifts between many of the characters, usually sharing their inner voices. Different officers. The bartender Riley was dating. The criminals being investigated. One voice is that of an unexpected character: the Clyde River itself.
Ghosts appear, but it is not a ghost story. The river “speaks,” but it is not a fantasy. Arsonists target locations in Hamburg and people die, but it really is not a crime novel or mystery. It is a book about broken people trying to come to terms with an unspeakable horror that hit them all.
Grief is a universal emotion that is particularly unique. My grief is not the same as your grief, even if the person we lost is the same person. My brother and I grieve for our sister differently. Not more or less, not better or worse. Just different. Our relationship with her was different, our contact with her was different, our loss is different, our circumstances are different. No loss is experienced the same way by any two people.
Somehow, Simone Bucholz captures that uniqueness in haunting and beautiful terms. No character is in the same place in their grief, in their loss, in their experience, and each chapter exquisitely captures the characters where they are. A big shout out to Rachel Ward’s translation, sharing the intensity, the humor, the sarcasm, the pain, and the joy in the different voices. These two have collaborated on a number of projects and the ones I have read have all been amazing.
River Clyde is hard to categorize. It is even harder to put down. Do not start this book at night if you need to get up early the next day. But do start this book as soon as you can. It is that good.
Our thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for our copy of River Clyde, given in exchange for our honest review as part of this blog tour. The opinions here are those of Scintilla. For other perspectives on this book, check out the other bloggers on this tour.
Also see:
Book Review: Mexico Street, Chastity Riley Book 3, Simone Buchholz, Translated by Rachel Ward
Book Review: River Clyde, Chastity Riley Book 5, Simone Bucholz, translated by Rachel Ward
Thanks for the blog tour support x